The social service wing has installed mess-o-meter that weighs food wasted

Ahmedabad: MICA-the school of ideas, have initiated an innovative campaign to address and prevent food wastage. Jagriti, the social service wing of MICA has launched the ‘Love Food, Hate Waste’ campaign by installing a ‘Mess-o-Meter’ in their mess halls to keep a tab of how much food is wasted every day.

Eashwar Gopalkrishnan, senior member of Team Jagriti said, “Around 500 people every day eat at the mess and off late we realised that a lot of food was being wasted as people would fill their plate at one go to avoid standing in the queue for the second round. Hence, we came up with this unique idea, where people would empty their plates in a box kept on the weighing machine. At the end of the day we calculate the food wasted and the number of people it could have otherwise served and put the numbers of the display board.

Guilt apparently hits the hardest, he added and said, “Within one week of our initiative, the graph of food wastage started showing a decline. As part of this initiative, we also had a provision to measure the item wasted the most and to our surprise, it was rice. We later spoke to the mess people as to how we can reduce the same.”

The display board on August 18 mentioned: 18.8 kg of food was wasted which could feed 54 people.

MICA dean Preeti Shroff says, “This is a timely initiative led by the students and makes us very proud of students’ sensitivity and actions towards addressing food production, consumption and wastage issues. The student committee has launched a poster campaign on campus and in the MICA canteen alerting all about not wasting food. There is an immediate impact on students and faculty and everyone is making sure not to take more food than required on their plates.”